January 2016

No doubt many of the Christmas cards that you sent or received this year featured a robin.  Just why it should be associated with Christmas is probably something to do with its prominence in the winter.  Evergreen Christmas card subjects like holly, ivy and mistletoe are also more noticeable when the deciduous trees have shed their leaves.  Snow also features because more than anything else, it makes the red breast of the robin really stand out.

Robin - Erithacus rubecula

Christmas cards that show robins as cute friendly creatures (often wearing a red fur-trimmed hat!) have, of course, got it completely wrong.  It is certainly a bold bird and if you walk through woods and see a small bird hopping about within a few yards of you, you can be almost certain it’s a robin.  The same will happen if you dig over your vegetable patch, and in both cases the bird is being bold because you are providing it with food – walking through woods disturbs the leaf litter and exposes insects and other invertebrates as much as digging does.  The robin will also aggressively defend a good source of food and will chase off other birds from a bird table until it has had its fill.

It is not only food that prompts aggressive behaviour either.  The robin is highly territorial and will firmly chase off any rival males that invade what he considers to be his patch (unless the other male happens to be more aggressive, in which case he will have to find another patch).  Curiously though, he will also chase off female robins.   To our eyes, male and female robins are identical, so maybe the male robin can’t tell the difference either.  Somehow I doubt that and suspect it is more to do with selecting a more determined mate.  She will have to approach him several times and do some determined flirting before he finally accepts her.  Having established his territory, he will advertise it with his familiar song that warns off other males and attracts prospective mates – well you didn’t think it was for our benefit did you?  He will sing when you put food out because the patch needs to be defended more, not out of gratitude.

Redpoll - Carduelis flammea

Bullfinch - Pyrrhula pyrrhula

If it was only the robin’s red breast that made the association with Christmas, then there are plenty more candidates.  The breasts of the chaffinch and brambling are perhaps a little dull, and that of the redpoll less often seen, but the beautiful male bullfinch would win any red breast competition hands down (or maybe primary feathers down).  Perhaps another reason for the robin’s association with Christmas is that they start their breeding season much earlier, and last year there was a news item about a robin nesting in a Christmas wreath on a front door.  The owners were happy to use the back door until the chicks fledged.

And finally some Christmas card candidates from Australia.

Eastern Yellow Robin 

Scarlet Rosella - they don't come redder than that!

December 2015

This is the last Nature Notes for 2015, and soon the television will be full of those dreadful ‘review of the year’ shows.  But there’s no need to worry, this won’t be a review of the natural year.  Nature is very much a ‘happening now’ subject and there’s usually too much going on right now to worry about what happened last month.  Besides, I have enough trouble remembering what happened last week anyway.  One thing that happened this week, however, was very memorable – I saw a badger!  Nothing remarkable about that you may say, but running across the lawn in the middle of the day, hours away from dusk?  It made me wonder why it was out in daylight and what had disturbed it.  Perhaps it was confused by this long drawn out autumn we are having – we’ve had the warmest October, and November also looks like setting records with a high of 22 deg. C in Wales on November the 1^st and two weeks of warm humid weather since then.  As I write this in mid-November there are still plenty of leaves left on the trees and we have Verbena, Fuchsia and ‘Bowles Mauve’ still in flower in the garden.  We even have a confused apple tree that put out a tentative bit of blossom a couple of weeks ago.

Eyed Hawkmoth

Hopefully, it will get colder soon and we’ll get some frost to slow down the garlic and ensure a good crop for next year.  Cold weather isn’t good for everything though, but most of the animals in your garden won’t experience that as they will have died weeks or even months ago.  Perhaps I should qualify that – by most, I mean numbers, and the largest number of visible animals in your garden are probably insects.  Most solitary insects like flies, midges, solitary bees and wasps, dragonflies and butterflies, have a very short life as an adult and may last only a few days or a few weeks at most.  These insects will have invested their future in eggs or larvae that will hopefully be in a safe place until spring warms enough to accelerate their growth process to become adults.  Not all insects do this though and there are some notable exceptions, especially larger insects like the winter damselfly and Peacock and Brimstone butterflies.  You would expect some of our larger moths like the hawkmoths to overwinter as well, but mostly this does not happen.  For many, like the convolvulus hawkmoth and pine hawkmoth, which are immigrant species, the UK moth book gives the stark message – unable to overwinter.  (For some, like the lime hawkmoth, the message is even more stark – does not feed.)  Most overwinter as a chrysalis – the privet hawkmoth sometimes twice.  The only hawkmoth I could find that overwinters as an adult is one of the smaller ones – the delightful humming-bird hawkmoth, which can cope with mild winters in the south west.

Convolvulus Hawkmoth

The social insects like bumblebees and wasps all die out in winter with the exception of mated queens that will carry the next generation as a packet of sperm in their abdomens.  Exceptions to this are the remarkable honey bee, that stores honey to keep the workers going over winter, and ants that are just basically tough and resourceful (and carnivorous) and stay underground.

One thing that prompted me to write about overwintering animals was curiosity about spiders and what happens to them at this time of year.   Sadly the answer is fairly boring – some overwinter as adults, and some don’t.  But while I was looking I found a very remarkable fact about spiders – they can fly!  And these are not just some exotic species shown to us by David Attenbrough from some jungle in South America, but things like our own British money spiders.  The spiderlings squirt enough silk from their spinnerets to form a sort of kite which is directed into the air in the hope of catching an up draught.  If successful, they let go of their perch and drift to wherever the wind takes them.  This is, of course, a risky strategy – they may end up in another spider’s web, or as a snack for swallows, or frozen at 30,000 feet, or even in the sea.  So why adopt such a strategy?  Well simply because staying around hundreds of other cannibalistic spiderlings is even more risky.

Humming-bird Hawkmoth

This picture of the humming-bird hawkmoth is a bit of a cheat in that I took the photo in Sicily.  In my defence I can confirm that I saw several this year from the kitchen window feeding on the verbena, but they had always gone by the time I got out with the camera.

Tree Bumblebee